Here is one of my favorite sets of minis, of all time. They're the Fungal Growth Spawn point for Super Dungeon Explore, and I based the color schemes on the various colors of mushroom monsters from the Dragon Quest series.

Some miniatures represent a real challenge. They’re loaded with so much detail that you may need to find references to figure out what all of it is, and even then you can run into difficulties making each individual bit pop. Lining each piece, and making sure the colors coordinate while also keeping the value contrast high enough that each bit stands out just enough (and not too much) can be challenging and rewarding.

Then there are minis like these Super Dungeon Explore’s ghosts. Somehow, I find myself absolutely loving these designs, despite their simplicity (I mean, we’ve got one area here, then the eyes).

These are some trolls from Super Dungeon Explore (the Mistmourn Coast Warband).

As with most of my own Super Dungeon set, I painted each one in its own color scheme.

The yellow troll colors I chose because they match the trolls from Fantasy Forest. Fantasy Forest is an old TSR game I played when I was five- it is basically like Candy Land except that you get ambushed by orcs and kobolds along the way.

The spawn point was just perfectly designed for an OSL effect, so I had to go that direction with it:

He was the first one I did, and his skin tone gave me quite a lot of trouble. It started out far too warm-brown, and I started glazing it with more blues and eventually got it to where it is.

After that, I had an idea of how I wanted their skin- I just wanted to do something like that with other colors. I'm not sure that I ended up with the same effect at all, but I do like how they all turned out.

The "every mini has a different color scheme" is something that I've been doing from the very start with my SDE. My wife and I divy up the minis, and we usually split up the spawn points. Since neither of us want to adhere to the other's color schemes, we just do every last one differently.

Also, I paint minis for a living, and I often end up working on groups in matching colors. For my hobby painting, I prefer to paint up each one as an individual.

There are only two rules to keep the whole- we use NMM rather than metallic metals, and the major colors are all 'book ended' with complimentary colors (like shade in purple, highlight in yellow).

Goblin-King wrote:

Spirit Walker is by far the most beautiful. Those brown/purple shades look spectacular.Imo he also has the most fitting troll skin color. The others look good but are BTFO by the Spiritwalker.

His is for sure the most natural skin tone. Part of that is because he has the most skin, and part of that came from the fact that it took me a while to get his skin tone working- and it ended up being the most complex skin tone of the lot (lots of glazes).

I had a tough time getting a green that I loved that both looked sort-of natural and also sort-of bright. After that, I mostly had to figure out what other colors of skin would work for the spawn point (I wanted all of them to be in that sort of natural, sort of jewel tone place).

I think I've improved at getting these natural-but-bright colors working. Recently, I've been using them for some of the larger monsters in Kingdom Death, and they've come out rather well.

There's something about Chibi miniatures that makes me want to create fan art out of them. Fan art for many things- Kingdom Death, Siege of the Citadel, Final Fantasy, Borderlands- the list seems to go on and on.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise when I want to create characters from one of my four year old's favorite book series- <em>The Princess in Black</em>. She's a princess who is secretly a super hero who fights monsters with her ninja skills (I really love these books)